


would complaining about it help?

by CampionSayn



Series: the anthony trollope way [4]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Not beta read - we die like men, alternate universe -age swap, ignoring season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2020-11-08 22:13:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20842850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CampionSayn/pseuds/CampionSayn
Summary: What if Max had been the older and Billy had been the younger sibling?





	would complaining about it help?

Max was tall, the first time she and Billy met at fourteen and ten respectively, in this facet of the universe. Very tomboy and very unwilling to let anyone even consider her to be a "little lady" and manage to keep a straight face. Quite a bit different to Billy at ten, a mop of static blond hair on his head, wary of strangers and the familiar alike, but with just enough soft edges to warm up to Max and shake her hand the first time Neil told him to.  
  
When Max's father and mother left each other, she didn't try to run away and get caught trying to catch a bus; she simply surrendered to living with Susan because, this time around, she knew having a con artist for a father and trying to live with him wouldn't be any better than living with a mom who was barely there anyway and had enough sense to leave Max to her own devices.  
  
She would not allow herself to be made a punching bag for the sake of her mother's poor life choices, however. After Susan picked three men who were basically the same person before deciding on Neil, who was worse but had a kid that she couldn't help but soften towards, this she was certain of. The boyfriend that got drunk and tried to kiss her learned the hard way.  
  
She would not allow for the boy, Billy, to be put through that either, not with Max there; tall and sturdy and strong for her age.   
  
Not for being a girl, as she was want to tell Billy repeatedly.   
  
"My being a girl doesn't mean I have to put up with anything. And it sure as shit doesn't make me less than whatever Neil seems to think."  
  
Something she couldn't help but make sure the kid understood after the first time, when he was ten and she was fourteen, that Neil took out his belt for an offhand comment Billy made and tried to make him "sorry" for ruining Susan's hard work making dinner by "being an ungrateful little shit."   
  
He'd struck Billy exactly once before Max had been out of her chair, on her feet, grabbed the belt and sucker-punched Neil so hard and quickly that he didn't have time to react before she was rushing the both of them out of the house and headed towards the pier. Low tide for summer, seagulls screaming long and their noise swallowing up the pulsing of their heartbeats as they walked in their own silence.  
  
They were both perfectly aware that Neil would make her a target after that. And he did. Even with Susan trying to be a half-way to halfway decent peacekeeper, Neil would always find an excuse, to use his mealy mouth for verbal abuse or use his grimy hands for physical abuse--he'd always find a way.  
  
But Max was not Neil's ex-wife, she was not Susan, and she would be there for Billy.  
  
They still had arguments, as siblings were meant to have as they got older and Max earned enough money through odd jobs--garage worker, nursing assistant, waitress in a skirt and roller skates that made her want to plant her fist into the face of some thirty different people in her first week--to buy her own car. Well, not _car_, exactly; a '79 Cherokee jeep she spent an extra thirty dollars on to be painted deep blue with mercury highlights. The back left tire was white walled and made the thing look almost ridiculous, but then she'd taken him out for a spin first thing after school, cruising up to the hills to get a look down at the city from under the Hollywood sign, their hair wild and windswept as they drank some Cola she'd bought before picking him up.  
  
"A car is like a pet, Billy, just because it looks weird doesn't mean it isn't healthy or just good to have around."  
  
He could honestly see her point when some assholes liked to give her shit about the thing, and then quickly shut their mouths when she constantly beat them in drag races and got tags that honest to god read '_LUCKY1_' to match.  
  
Then Billy turned thirteen and the universe decided to fuck things up for him because of all the good stuff that had been in his life thanks to Max.  
  
Neil had been behaving way worse as Max was nearing her seventeenth birthday, she cut her hair "like a dyke," and helped Billy paint his nails black; encouraged him to grow out his hair if he wanted to, "Even if that mullet look is gonna be looked back on as a mistake one day, I swear," and Neil kept assuming that the both of them were up to no good whenever they were out late by the pier.  
  
Up to no good, as it were, was Max being okay with Billy being a little more than friends with a boy in his class and pretending not to notice the way they held hands when they thought nobody was looking; taking them to the mall and the skate park and the pier to give them a little privacy.  
  
Then Susan, goddamn her, made an observation the one time Max had brought them to the house to get sunscreen and soda before she thought their parents would be home, and Neil literally went ballistic.  
  
The boy ran off when Neil said no son of his would be some faggot and took the first swing at Billy, which quickly devolved into Max getting in front of him, like she always did, and Neil saying he wouldn't let some dyke bitch ruin his boy--which had the immediate effect of Max saying the one thing that could make the moment worse; defending who they were.  
  
Max spent two weeks in the hospital, Billy ended up with his arm in a sling complementing his black eye, and Susan suggested they take Neil's offer of a job in Hawkins, Indiana to start fresh.  
  
Billy had never hated Susan more in his life and Max would never forgive her for helping Neil cover this up, but neither of them blamed each other. Those scars cemented that they were the only family the two could call their own, and they would remember it when they found themselves in Small Town USA that October.  
  
It looked boring as hell, but of course it wasn't, as Billy was the most interesting person that had appeared in the middle school in almost a year. And hopefully "not like that crazy bitch" that had gone missing, as a couple of the school bullies had muttered when they'd tried to introduce themselves to him and he'd swiftly blown them off.  
  
As much as gaining friends was something Billy would like, he'd owed too much to Max by thirteen to hang around with people that made fun of girls that existed outside the norm.   
  
Which is why, in this universe, Will Byers ended up becoming friends with him, drawing him into hanging out with The Party--anyone that could stand up to Troy making fun of girls was more than okay in his books, and the others agreed.  
  
_(Billy understood after Will invited him over with the others to see if he would like to play Dungeons and Dragons--he did and loved it, even if Mike was a little huffy after Dustin suggested Billy try out for the Mage, and only perked up a little when Billy said a Barbarian or Fighter might go better with his personality--and met Joyce Byers. Frazzled and a little air headed, but a good mom who apparently went through hell to get Will back when he went missing the year before and nobody would believe or help her, not even Will and Jonathan's asshole father.)_  
  
It was a little more difficult for Max to get on in this universe, in high school, the way Billy did at seventeen. She didn't have girls fawning over her after she showed up in the school parking lot, not dressed all in skin tight denim, but in red and black flannel with torn jeans and steel tipped boots, bag slung over her shoulder and a scathing look directed at a row of boys who thought cat-calling her would be a good idea.  
  
She had no intent to show up at the Halloween party after dropping Billy off in his Mike Myers costume, but it seemed like something to do and she was glad, two days later, because in this world, when Nancy called Steve "bullshit" and he wandered out of the house, she was hanging out along the treeline. Max was there when he crouched behind his car and kept quiet and out of sight, tears streaming down his face, muttering, "It wasn't our fault, we weren't there, it wasn't our fault... Of course it's not okay--I have to live with that _goddamn_ pool..."  
  
Max doesn't approach him, this "King" Steve that Tommy H. mocks endlessly, with all the effort of someone that used to be half a friend, but she does hover out of sight to make sure when he gets in his car that he's at least sober enough to drive home. And she keeps an eye out for him the next day, even sort of eavesdropping on him and Nancy Wheeler while taking a break from the track team and seeing how Harrington looks like Wheeler killed his dog or something when he finally walked out from behind the school and went back to gym class.  
  
In this world, when Dustin found Dart, the explanations came a lot sooner, because Billy wasn't Max and therefore Mike wasn't as inclined to keep him out because there was no way that Billy could replace El. So when Dustin brought the thing in and Billy just blinked and asked for an explanation... which was actually interrupted not once, or twice, but three times by things.  
  
Like Will having an out of body (_possession_) experience much earlier and Mike going off with him to Owens. Like Dustin noticing Dart's evolution much earlier as well _(before Mews got eaten)_, but it being less of a big deal because he actually managed to get a hold of both Lucas and Billy who had been at Mike's house looking for both Wheeler and Will when they both missed school...  
  
Like all three of them being there when Steve pulled up to give Nancy flowers and apologize for something that was entirely NOT his fault.   
  
And if Billy had thought there was a chance in California that he wasn't gay, he had absolutely no doubts at all when they all arrived at Dustin's and Steve slung that bat over his shoulder. He looked like a cast member of Mad Max in the Thunderdome, but _better_.  
  
Honestly, finding the hole in the cellar and the ruptured and discarded skin of the mutant creature had been secondary to Billy's taking in Harrington, "Jesus, he's like Rob Lowe and all the Anaheim Angels rolled into one."  
  
Though, speaking of Mad Max...  
  
Unlike in the world familiar, Max actually worried when her little brother didn't show up back home after dark and went looking for him of her own volition, no Neil required to threaten and abuse her into action, just her finishing up working on her car, changing out of grease stained jeans and shirt and finding it to be nightfall and no Billy anywhere to be found.  
  
She'd changed into jeans and leather, gotten on her boots and drove her jeep around to the Wheelers, the Hendersons, and then finally bribed a probable location out of Erica at the Sinclairs.  
  
"He's probably with my brother and his fellow nerds," she'd rambled, hand writing actually legible as she wrote down both addresses in exchange for the extra large Three Musketeers and Hershey bars Max had nicked out of Billy's candy sack in her back seat, "They're either at the Byers house or the junkyard in this creepy looking old bus they use as a fort sometimes. Give Lukey my love when you send him home; he'll owe me if he doesn't want to get grounded."  
  
They shared a mutual grin that could only come from girls that had brothers for siblings that they loved, but were also exasperated by constantly.  
  
Max liked her.  
  
So of course, when she happened into the junkyard, good mood as high as it was ever going to get, almost running over Harrington as he barreled around fighting what looked like a bunch of fucked up dogs to the soundtrack of three kids--including her brother--screaming 'abort, abort, abort!' it went without saying that feeling turned static and impaled the hundred-eighty degrees real quick.  
  
Especially when one of the 'dogs' broke through her passenger window and the only reason she didn't die was on account of her slamming her fist into it's _(gaping, flower mawed, billion toothed)_ face, with Harrington bashing the thing across three junk cars and yanking her out; the both of them bolting into the rusty piece of shit bus like stock brokers running out of town on Black Tuesday.  
  
"Well," Billy breathed, once the threat of the Demodogs passed, Steve having pushed the three kids behind him and into Max, arms folded around all of them _(Lucas being perfectly aware that she was way too old for him and a million times out of his league, but catch him giving a shit--she was the most beautiful girl he'd over laid eyes on and fuck it if now he and Billy were the exact same level of pathetic after that night)_ and still breathing hard even as the echoed howling passed, "Still not bored. How about you Max?"

**Author's Note:**

> This was considerably shorter than I intended, but I'm still abiding by the rules I set for myself. Trick or treat my people~


End file.
